Highways Voices 15 - Signals and training with John Nightingale and Jackie Davies

The move to online, will improve training programmes and support at-home working, this week's Highways Voices has heard. Listen here.

These are the thoughts of one of this week's guests, John Nightingale, Director of training specialist JCT Consultancy and organiser of the annual JCT Traffic Signals Symposium. He said: "Developing proper online training isnt just about setting up a Teams or Zoom account, you have to put a lot of effort into the way these courses are structured and then you can actually replicate a classroom experience with a great deal of success by being innovative."

Further to that, Mr Nightingale and this week's other guest, Jackie Davies, Principal UTMC Engineer at Bristol City Council have collaborated to develop a new online training programme aimed at helping support traffic signal engineers to get the best out of their traffic sgnals systems. You can find out more by listening to the podcast.

Mr Nightingale said this was driven by a dramatic decline in skills. " Traffic Signal departments and roles have been decimated through voluntary early retirement and through budget cuts because of outsourcing, as a result, the numbers of the peoples in signal department has been dropping. And even then what you'll find is that that signal engineer is left there has been given additional responsibilities. So, there really isn't a manpower and there certainly isn't that that sort of skill base where you would learn from the older, more experienced engineers, and many people are really out on a limb."